Hello,

After having read a couple of the recent posts by Cagliostro and tommy made me think of my favourite prop bet, which is the birthday bet. Basically you bet on how many random people you have to ask for two persons to have the same birth day. (The number is 23 and the math is explained here if you want to know: http://mathforum.org/dr.math/faq/faq.birthdayprob.html). I usually put the number at 25 as it is nice and round and gives me a slightly higher edge. It is a great bet as most people don't understand the math behind it, and their intuition makes them guess a number that is way off. This is a bet I have been coming back to over the years, and it has earned me everything from a beer to a nice little bundle of cash ... over and over again. It certainly has proved a worker for me.

What is your favourite prop bet? Which is your worker? Which prop bet do you like to come back to either because it works so nicely, or simply because you fancy it? Care to share?
/

I think you misunderstood something. 23 people have 50 % chance for any 2 of them to have their birthday on the same day. It's far from guaranteed. 25 has much higher chance though.
The link is broken btw.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthday_problem

I think I didn't make myself clear if you think I misunderstood something.

It is indeed "only" just over 50% to win. But if we flip a coin and you give me odds on the flip, I'm going to do it all day and all night because I have the best of it. Same thing here. When I said "worker" I didn't mean a sure thing, what I meant with "worker" is that it is a bet that people are sufficeiently interested in to accept the bet despite giving you an edge.

Another of my favourites that I keep coming back to is a variation on the "Monte Hall Three Card Monte" which Cagliostro posted about not long ago. That's not a sure thing either, but good enough to keep going for a while. Another one would be "Hold'em rock, scissors, paper" where you let a person choose either AKo, 22, or 89s and then you can pick the hand that has an edge against it and run the hand down. Not a sure thing, but if they don't understand the math behind it, you are bound to make some money.

I hope I clarified? What I was curious about was what prop bets you guys enjoy using either for beer, food or money? (can be either sure things, props with an edge, or simply something you do for amusement).

Oh sorry. I've gotten it wrong then.
But it's not really worth doing IMO.
With 25 people, you got around ~55% chance to win.
Maybe you'd play this all night long with a crooked coinflip, but the procedure is quite long in the birthday bet

So this is not your favourite prop, fair enough. Do you have one?

(As for not worth it, well, it's been very profitable to me.)

I guess the best prop bet I made was betting that I could lose more weight than my pal. We bet so much a pound and weighed in once a month. Well I lost money but we both got much fitter than we were.

Here's a good one.

You say to the mark to select 3 cards values for you. For instance he chooses 3, 7 and 10. Now, here's the procedure. You draw 4 cards out of a genuinely shuffled pack. If a 3, 7 or 10 shows, you score 1 point. You put the card back into the deck, shuffle and start again. You can make it in 5 games or, better, until one of the guys scores 5 points.

You're not gonna pay too many beers since it's about 80% of chances for you... The beauty of this one is that he selects your cards and he has 40 cards for him, 77% of the pack!

I have many other ones like that.

I really like that one.

Reminds me a bit of ten card poker, which is a wonderful little trick.

And yes, I probably want to hear many other ones like that ...